A Patient Portal That
Actually Gets Used

How the patient portal fits with your EHR

The MedSiteAI patient portal is not a replacement for your EHR — it's a patient-facing layer that sits in front of it. Patients log in by SMS one-time code, complete intake forms, message your team, view upcoming appointments, and download visit documents. Behind the scenes, those actions sync into the chart system you already use.

For the EHRs we have native integration with — Epic, Cerner, athenahealth, DrChrono, NextGen, eClinicalWorks, Allscripts, Greenway, Jane App, ChiroTouch, Open Dental, ACOM Health, ChiroFusion, and a growing list of others — bookings, intake answers, and uploaded documents land directly in the patient's chart. Your front desk does not double-enter anything. For systems we integrate via FHIR R4 or HL7, the same flows work with a slightly different sync cadence (typically 30-60 second push). For the small handful of legacy practice-management systems we don't integrate natively yet, the portal still works fully on the patient side; staff confirms the chart entry once during a single daily review window.

Importantly, the EHR remains the source of truth for clinical data. The portal mirrors what's relevant to the patient — appointments, balances, secure messages, intake forms, signed consent forms, after-visit summaries — but never holds the canonical clinical record. If you switch EHRs in the future, your portal stays. If you switch off MedSiteAI, your EHR keeps every record.

HIPAA, PHI handling, and the BAA

Every plan includes a Business Associate Agreement (BAA). Patient data is encrypted in transit with TLS 1.3 and at rest with AES-256. SMS one-time codes are short-lived and rate-limited per phone number. Secure messages are stored separately from public-facing site content and are audit-logged with timestamps, user IDs, and IP addresses for the full HIPAA-required retention period.

Document uploads (intake forms, insurance cards, ID photos, lab results) get short-lived signed URLs — by default 30 days — so the file URL expires even if it leaks. Staff access to patient PHI is gated by role-based permissions, and every read/write event is captured in the audit log with who-did-what-when. Account access from a new device requires a fresh SMS verification, and we support optional TOTP two-factor authentication for staff accounts on the admin side.

We do not use patient PHI to train AI models, and we do not sell or share data with third parties. The full BAA is signed before your portal goes live; you receive a countersigned PDF copy for your compliance file. SOC 2 Type II controls are mapped to HIPAA Security Rule safeguards.

What your practice still controls

The portal is the patient-facing surface; your team owns every clinical decision and every outbound message. You set business hours, intake-form questions, automated message templates, appointment policies, cancellation rules, late-fee handling, and what document categories patients can see. You decide whether messages go to a single shared inbox or fan out per provider. You decide whether the portal lets patients self-schedule new-patient visits or request only.

On the EHR side, your existing workflow doesn't change. Front desk continues to use Epic (or whatever your system is) the same way they always have. The portal is additive — it captures patient inputs and pushes them into the chart, then surfaces only what the patient should see. We never auto-respond on your behalf without your explicit template approval, and you can disable specific portal features per-clinic if multi-location practice rules differ.

Implementation timeline

First draft of the portal — branded to your practice, wired to your EHR, with sample patients loaded — typically lands in 48 hours. Most practices go live with real patients in 5-7 business days. The bottleneck is usually your team's schedule for a 30-minute kickoff call (intake question selection, message templates, hours, BAA sign-off) plus the EHR sandbox approval if you're on Epic, Cerner, or athenahealth.

For practices on systems where we don't have native integration yet, we can usually have a FHIR or HL7 bridge running within 10 business days. We don't bill the portal launch separately — it's included in your monthly plan with no setup fee.